David Irving, is thrown out of a Polish book convention for breaking anti-nazi laws

[Strengthandhonour]

David Irving, is thrown out of a Polish book convention for breaking anti-nazi laws

New Criminologist

Nick Morris

May 20, 2007




British “historian” and convicted Holocaust denier, David Irving, has been thrown out of a Polish book fair due to the Nazi apologist nature of his writings.

Organisers of a Polish book fair today asked Irving, who was jailed in Austria for denying the Holocaust, to leave the event.

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Irving had been scheduled to present his books at an event organised by British publisher Focal Point, said Grzegorz Guzowski, head of the Ars Polonia company, which organised the Warsaw International Book Fair.

He said Irving's publishers did not send materials detailing his work to the fair until a few hours before the deadline, giving organisers too little time to prevent the self-taught historian from setting up a table at the exhibition.

"Polish laws prohibiting the promotion of fascism and defamation of people on racial and religious grounds could conceivably be extended to include Irving's writings," he added.

Guzowski said that, when organisers were alerted to the nature of Irving’s work, he told the writer to go.

“I told him his message was in violation of Polish law and that I would not allow him to deliver it at the book fair premises, and I asked him to leave,” Guzowski said.

“At first he refused and started shouting that there is no freedom of speech and that Poland is not a democratic country, but eventually he left,” he added.

"Our employees helped him pack up his things, and our car drove him to the address he specified."

Irving was sentenced in February 2006 to three years under an Austrian law that applies to “whoever denies, grossly plays down, approves or tries to excuse” the Nazi genocide or other Nazi crimes against humanity.

The charges stemmed from two speeches he gave in Austria in 1989.

He was released after a court converted two-thirds of his three-year sentence into probation.

In Poland, denying the Holocaust is a crime that can carry a prison term. However, Irving is not currently under investigation there.

Irving plans to remain in the country for a few more days to visit Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps in Poland.

"It's ironic that it's come to a situation like this in Poland, which fought against restrictions on speech for such a long time," Irving was quoted by daily Zycie Warszawy as saying.

source: Holocaust denier, David Irving, is thrown out of a Polish book convention for breaking anti-nazi laws

[Errigal]

How wonderful! Thanks to modern technology and the stupidity of Americans, the Jews are able to run Poland from the comfort of their new home in Washington.

[Sergius]

Originally Posted by Strengthandhonour

“historian”

Heh.
I may have asked before, but can anyone explain just what his Holocaust revisionism amounts to? How far-reaching it is, I mean.

[Errigal]

Originally Posted by Ljubomir

Heh.
I may have asked before, but can anyone explain just what his Holocaust revisionism amounts to? How far-reaching it is, I mean.

I wish I could. He is a real historian who has made quite a few contributions to the knowlege of Nazi Germany and Churchill, but he seems to be playing a tricky game now. I have had a good look at his website and his publicly stated views on the Holocaust seem really hard to pin down.

[Theobald]

Originally Posted by Ljubomir

I may have asked before, but can anyone explain just what his Holocaust revisionism amounts to? How far-reaching it is, I mean.

Here you go :

Over the years, Irving's stance on the Holocaust has changed significantly. Until 1988, when he started to espouse Holocaust denial openly, Irving never sought to deny the reality of the Holocaust and for this reason many Holocaust deniers were ambivalent about him. They admired Irving for the pro-Nazi slant in his work and the fact that he possessed a degree of mainstream credibility that they lacked, but were annoyed that he did not openly deny the Holocaust. Typical of the ambiguity felt by them was a letter written in 1984 by the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson in the Journal of Historical Review (the official journal of the Institute for Historical Review (I.H.R)). In an open letter entitled “A Challenge to David Irving”, Faurisson praised Irving as an historian but criticized him for maintaining that the Holocaust had taken place, and challenged him to take up the cause of Holocaust denial. It has been alleged that the original draft of Faurisson's open letter was more critical of Irving, but Willis Carto persuaded Faurisson to tone down the criticism, lest it alienate Irving (who had spoken at a conference sponsored by the I.H.R. in September 1983) from the I.H.R.. It is not known what Irving’s response to Faurisson’s letter was.

Until 1988, Irving seemed torn between a desire to be taken seriously as an historian and a desire to associate with those he seemed to share an ideological affinity with. In the first edition of Hitler's War, Irving footnotes, "I cannot accept the view. .. [that] there exists no document signed by Hitler, Himmler or Heydrich speaking of the extermination of the Jews." By the mid-1980s, however, Irving associated himself with the Holocaust-denying I.H.R., began giving lectures to groups such as the far-right German Deutsche Volksunion, and publicly denied that the Nazis systematically exterminated Jews in gas chambers during World War II. He also alleged that parts of The Diary of Anne Frank might have been forged by her surviving father, and in 1988 testified for the defence at Canadian-based Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel's trial. Irving was later to claim that Zündel had convinced him that the Holocaust had not occurred.

In the 1988 Zündel trial, Irving repeated and defended his claim from Hitler's War that until October 1943 Hitler knew nothing about the actual implementation of the Final Solution. He also expressed his evolving belief that the Final Solution involved "atrocities", not systematic murder.

As to what evidence further led Irving to believe that the Holocaust never occurred, he cited a report by self-styled execution expert Fred A. Leuchter, which claimed there was no evidence for the existence of homicidal gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp. After the trial, Irving published Leuchter's report in the United Kingdom and wrote its foreword. In Errol Morris' 1999 documentary about Leuchter, Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., Irving said, "The big point [of the Leuchter report]: there is no significant residue of cyanide in the brickwork. That's what converted me. When I read that in the report in the courtroom in Toronto, I became a hard-core disbeliever."[31] In his 1991 revised edition of Hitler's War he had removed all references to death camps and the Holocaust.

Many have considered Irving’s historical arguments to be very convoluted. An example occurred in the above-mentioned interview with Ron Rosenbaum, when Rosenbaum questioned Irving about a memoir that had come into Irving's possession that was alleged to have been written by Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s. (The precise authenticity of the Eichmann Memoirs is in doubt, but parts of the book, according to the German Federal Archives, appeared to be genuine.) Irving had received the alleged memoir during a visit to Argentina in 1991 and was quite proud of his find. In The Eichmann Memoirs, Eichmann claimed to have heard from Himmler that Hitler had given a verbal order authorizing the Holocaust, thereby contradicting Irving's claim in Hitler’s War that Hitler was unaware of the Holocaust. Irving's response to the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust in The Eichmann Memoirs was to claim that Eichmann wrote his memoirs in 1956 at the time of the Suez War, and was fearful that Cairo, Egypt might fall to Israel. Irving's reasoning is that if Cairo was taken by the Israeli Defence Forces, then the Israelis might discover the "rat-line", as undercover smuggling networks for Nazis were known, that had allowed Eichmann to escape to Argentina, and that therefore Eichmann had written his memoirs as a potential defense in the event of being captured by the Israelis. In this way, Irving argued that The Eichmann Memoirs were genuine but that the claim that Hitler ordered the Holocaust was false — only made to reduce Eichmann's responsibility for the Holocaust. Also in the same interview, Irving claimed to want to be accepted as a scholar by other historians and bemoaned having to associate with what he called the lunatic anti-Semitic fringe groups; he claimed he would disassociate himself from these as soon as he was accepted by the historians' community.

[Nerthus]

He is suing the Warsaw Book Fair.

DAVID IRVING the British historian and publisher of Focal Point Publications announced today that he will instruct Warsaw lawyers to sue Ars Polona S.A., organiser of the annual Warsaw International Book Fair, for damages for breach of contract, after its president Mr Grzegorz Guzowski ordered him to remove his stand immediately from the exhibition on May 18. [...]